Transcript Communication - UNESCO-IHE

Human Communication
UDSM, January 2010.
English for Water Managers
Introduction to Communication
• In today’s world, communication
enables man to influence and
control his environment and is
seen as one of the conditions for
development. Not only is
communication an integral part of
human life, but it is also the pivot
of society as the key component
of all cultural, political, educational
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Communication cont/
• Positive change is achieved as a result of the
efficient and effective flow of information, a
process that can only obtain through the use of
effective communication skills.
• . People in organizations typically spend over
75% of their time in an interpersonal situation;
thus it is no surprise to find that at the root of a
large number of organizational problems is poor
communication
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Purpose of this module
• The Communication Skills module will
enable Integrated Water Resource
Management (IWRM) experts to
examine the relationship between the
theory and practice of communication,
• to demonstrate how the acquisition of
Communication
Skills
enhances
decision-making processes,
• encourages the smooth flow of
information and how, through mastery
of communication skills, IWRM
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Objectives of the Module
• Raise an awareness and understanding of
communication dynamics
• equip IWRM experts with requisite skills needed in
making their clients aware of IWRM-related issues.
• Enable IWRM managers make informed decisions on
crucial issues affecting their interaction with the
environment.
• equip Water Managers with the knowledge, skills and
techniques needed in evaluating a variety of situations
and circumstances likely to arise during interaction with
clients.
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• Working with different view points
What is Communication?
• Communication is a process in
which feelings, ideas are
expressed as verbal and/or nonverbal messages, sent, received and
comprehended.
• Theodorson (1969) quoted in
McQuail and Windhal (1993)
defines communication as ‘the
transmission of information, ideas,
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Definition (cont)
• Rodgers (1986) in Communication
Technology defines ‘communication’
as “a process in which participants create
and share information with one another in
order to reach a mutual understanding”.
• Carey
(1992)
defines
communication as ‘a symbolic process
whereby reality is produced, maintained,
repaired and transformed .
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Communication (cont)
• Human communication is dynamic – the
communication process is always in a
constant state of change. As attitudes,
feelings, expectations, emotions of
persons who are communicating change,
the nature of their communication changes
as well
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Communication
• Communication is continuous – it never stops.
Human beings are always processing
information and ideas, thoughts, expressions all
the time, whether awake or asleep – our brains
remain active and are always communicating.
• Communication is irreversible : once we send a
message, we cannot undo it. Once we make a
slip of the tongue, or give a meaningful glance
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Communication
Or an emotional outburst, we cannot erase it.
Sometimes our apologies, denial cannot erase
what has taken place.
• Communication
is
interactive
:
as
communicators, we are constantly in contact
with other people and with our selves. Other
people react to our speech, actions and we also
react to our own speech – it becomes a cycle of
action
reaction becomes the basis of
our communication.
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Communication
• Communication is contextual : it is a part
our entire human experience. We need
develop an awareness and skills necessary
function as effective communicators and
adapt to:
 the setting
 the people present
 the purpose of the communication
of
to
to
to
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Human Communication
• This occurs on basically 3 levels:
 Intrapersonal communication with one self. It
encompasses thought processing, personal
decision making, listening, and determination of
self concept.
Interpersonal communication takes place
between two persons who establish a
communicative relationship. This includes
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Human Communication
activities such as interviews, conversations and
small group discussions.
• Public communication is characterized by a
speaker sending a message to an audience. This
may be face to face or direct communication for
example, delivering a message or it maybe
indirect such as relaying a message through the
radio or television.
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Communication Process
• SENDER (SOURCE OF INFORMATION:
Originator of the message (WHO).
• MESSAGE : WHAT IS COMMUNICATED.
• CHANNEL : By WHAT MEANS is the
message communicated.
• RECEIVER : AUDIENCE
• FEEDBACK : RESPONSE to the message.
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Source of the Message
• Communication starts when a Source is
consciously or unconsciously stimulated by
some event, object or idea. A need to send a
message in then followed by a memory search to
find the appropriate language (verbal or nonverbal) in which to take the ideas and put them
into message (encode).
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Message
• What is to be communicated to the audience.
The Channel
• The means by which the message is
communicated to the audience e.g, we rely on
five senses, electronic channel – telephones
(sound), television (sight), physical contact e.g.
tapping a person on the shoulder (touch
channel)
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Examples of Communication
Channels
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Communication channels cont.
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Choosing a channel
When choosing what channel to use to
communicate
particular information, the following should be
focused on :
• the availability of the channel
• the credibility of the channel
• permanence
• speed with which information is disseminated
• and potential for feedback from the receiver to
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Communication channels cont.
• the diversity of cultural, linguistic and social
groupings
• the physical barriers of terrain and distance
which have resulted in an undeveloped transport
and communication infrastructure
• the educational barrier of illiteracy
• limited access to the mass media
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Audience
• Audience refers to the Receiver of the message.
The message must be translated (Decoded) into
the receiver’s own language system. This
message is not identical to the other encoded by
the source because each person’s symbol system
is shaped by a unique set of perceptions.
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Feedback
• Once meaning is assigned to the received
message - the receiver is in a position to
respond. Feedback can be a verbal or nonverbal reaction to the message or both.
Feedback indicates whether the receiver
understands the message e.g by nodding,
misunderstands (by shrugging shoulders),
encouraging source to continue (by leaning
forward and saying ‘yes’) or by pulling back
(disagrees).
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Feedback (cont)
• The act of responding by which the
receiver sends feedback to the source,
actually shifts the role of the receiver
to that source.
Noise
• Messages are influenced not only by
interpretations of each communicator
but also by noise which is any internal
or external interference in the
communication
process
(e.g.
environmental, physiological, semantic
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The Context.
• Communication does not occur in a vacuum – it
always relates to a context. That is:
Who is present
Where the communication is taking place (e.g.
size of the room)
General attitude of those assembled
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Communication cont.
• Communication is power. Those who have mastered its
effective use can change their own experience of the world
and the world’s experience of them.(Anthony
Robbins).
• What do you think is the single most
important benefit of learning the skills of
communication?
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Test yourself…
• Respond to each of the following statements
with T for true if you think the statement is
always or usually true and F for false if you
think the statement is always or usually false.
1. Good communicators are born, not made
2. The more you communicate, the better your
communication will be.
3. Unlike effective speaking, effective listening
really cannot be taught.
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Test
4. Opening lines such as Hello, how are you or Fine
weather today serve no useful communication
purpose
5. Like good communicators, leaders are born and
not made.
6. Fear of public speaking is detrimental and must
be eliminated.
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Language and Meaning
• The process of communication
involves using words to create meaning
and expectations. Meanings are in
people and not in words – as you go
through this course, it is important for
you to note that you have your own
meaning that you ascribe to words you
use and other people have theirs.
• A Japanese proverb “ By your mouth
you shall perish” brings in another
dimension on language and
communication – the dimension of
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Language and Meaning
• As Water Managers, you work in
different cultures and subcultures
different from your own. All these have
different languages that vary from
culture to culture - it is important to
recognize that the language we speak
helps sustain our perception of reality
and our view of our world
• -in your day to day interaction with
communities you work with, you
should not assume that the words you
use and the words people from other
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Language and Gender
• Sometimes the sex of the
communicators affects not only the
meaning they give to their utterances
but also the very structure of those
utterances. A linguist, Deborah
Tannen, points out that women and
men use different “gender-lects” –
• while women speak and hear a
language of “connection and
intimacy”,
• men speak and hear a language of
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Language and Gender
• As a result, when conversing with men,
#women tend to listen attentively rather
than interrupt
or challenge, what a man is saying.
#Another researcher, Gillagan (1982)
asserts that
women are guided morally by a
motivation to
maintain relationships and protect their
social
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Language and Gender
• Men are said to argue linearly to solve a
problem of a moral conflict, generally
arriving at a definitive conclusion –
distance is established to distance
oneself from personal involvement in
the decision-making process itself
• the assumption seems to be that
challenging men in conversation could
damage the established connection that
most women believe must be preserved
at all costs.
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Male-Female Communication
•
•
•
•
•
Men
Use speech to report
To compete
To gain attention
To maintain their position in a social
hierarchy
•
•
•
•
Women
Use speech to gain rapport
To maintain relationships
To reflect a sense of community.
• .
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Men-Female
Men
• Men tend to use Language to preserve their
independence
• Men tend to say what they have to say,
assume that the message is clear and proceed
from that point.
Women
• Tend to use Language to create intimacy and
connection
• Women use more words to make their point
– they tend to be more sensitive to the needs
of their listener, spend time clarifying to 34
Male-Female
Men
• Men tend to be task-oriented, they
want results at all cost
• Men are more direct – when men want
something, they ask for it directly
Women
• Women tend to be more maintenanceoriented
• Tend to be more supportive
conversationalists – they are likely to
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Male-Female
Men
• Men tend to be self-oriented and concerned
with action.
• Men have been taught to hide or disregard
their feelings
• Men are interested in visual stimulation and
physical detail
Women
Women disclose more personal information
than men do. In their vocabulary, women
tend to be people oriented and concerned
with psychological and emotional states. 36
Meaning and Experience
• The meanings of words are based on our
experiences with the words and things they
represent. Take note of this observation from
Anton Chekov “ If you cry Forward! you must
be sure to make clear the direction in which to
go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and
simply call out the word to a monk and a
revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite
directions(Anton Chekov)
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Male-Female
• Men
• Men offer solutions and invalidated feelings
• Men tend to pull away and silently think about
what might be bothering them
• Men are motivated when they feel needed
• Men primarily need a love that is trusting,
accepting and appreciative
• Men think women want solutions rather than
empathy
• Men feel that instead of feeling nurtured, he
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• Women
• Women offer unsolicited advice and direction
• Women feel an instinctive need to talk about
what is bothering them
• Women are motivated when they feel cherished
• Women primarily need a love that is caring,
understanding and respectful
• Women complain that men don’t listen – they
want empathy
• Women might think that they are nurturing men.
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Communication and Culture
• Communication and
Culture have a direct
link. Culture consists of
all those individuals who
have a shared system of
interpretation.
• No culture can live, if it
attempts to be exclusive
(Mahatma Gandhi)
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Communicating in a Culturally diverse
world and society.
• To help you assess your personal preparedness
to communicative effectively with persons of
different cultures, respond to each of the
following statements by labeling as either True
or False:
1. I try to communicate with persons like me as
often as I can
2. I rarely consider my culture or the cultures of
the individual I am interacting with
3. I find it difficult to , tell when persons from
other cultures do not understand me
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4. I am fearful of persons from different cultures
6.People from other cultures who don’t talk when
around others act that way because they usually
have nothing to say
7. Disagreements with persons from other cultures
should always be expressed openly
8. My culture is superior to other cultures
9. I am uncertain how to behave with persons of
different cultures.
10. I am unfamiliar with rules of any culture other
than my own.
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Intercultural Communication
• This can be defined as the process of
interpreting and sharing meanings with
individuals from different cultures. It also
comprises interracial, inter ethnic,
international, intra-cultural – which
includes all forms of communication
among members of the same racial,
ethnic or sub-cultures.
• Who are the people involved in
teaching members of a community
their culture? Parents, teachers,
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Activity
• What steps have you personally taken to
reduce the strangeness of strangers?
(Intercultural Communication)
• Note all of us work hard enough to
understand or to be understood by those
with whom we differ. To counter this
‘strangeness’, we need to:
• Open ourselves to differences by adding to
our knowledge of others
• By learning to cope with uncertainty
• By developing an appreciation of how
increasing our cultural sensitivity will
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Activity
• How do individual’s feelings about socialization
differ from your own?
• To what extent do the individuals values and
attitude differ from yours
• Which of your behaviours did the individual
have difficulty understanding or accepting?
Which of his or her behaviours did you have
difficulty with?
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Activity
• Individualism versus Collectivism
• Individualistic cultures for example, in the UK,
France, Germany, Canada focus on stressing the
individual goals, whereas collectivistic cultures
for example, Arabic, African, Asian, Latin
American countries, group goals are given
precedence instead.
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Activity
• Collectivistic cultures:
• Tend to nurture group influence – “We” is
dominant in such cultures.
• These are also referred to as high context cultures,
that are tradition bound, that is, cultural
traditions shape the behaviour and lifestyle of
group members causing them to appear overly
polite and indirect in relating to others.
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Activity
•
•
•
•
•
Individualistic cultures:
Cultivate individual initiative and
achievement - “I” is important
Generally encourage members to exhibit a
more direct communication style for
example, Americans tend to speak directly
on an issue, whereas individuals from Japan,
Korea, China prefer to avoid confrontation
to preserve:
sense of harmony
to make it possible for the individuals with
whom they are speaking to save face or
maintain self-esteem.
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Intercultural communication
• Improving intercultural communication
• One can do this by accepting the fact that our
culture is
• not superior to other cultures
• avoid basing our behaviour expectations for
members of other cultures on our own cultures
norms.
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Activity
• How to improve your ability to
communicate interculturally
• limit your reliance on stereotypes that can
diminish your success when you interact with
others
• there is need for you to reduce your
uncertainty levels regarding the persons of
different cultures with whom you
communicate
• Refrain from formulating expectations based
on solely on your culture
• Recognise how faulty education can impede
understanding(personal biases, prejudices,
acknowledge differences that you have
developed over the years)
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Communication and self concept
• How do your friends picture you?
• Self-concept
• Spend some time considering who you are and what
you intend to do with the rest of your life. Self concept
is everything you think and feel about yourself.
• It is the entire collection of attitudes and beliefs you
hold about who and what you are. E One is not born
with self concept but develops one. Although one
undergoes changes, it is difficult to alter or change the
picture you have of yourself. The way we are treated by
others influences our sense of self.
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Self concept is shaped by :
• One’s environment
• By people around you for example, peers, relatives
• If people important to you have made you feel
accepted, valued, worthwhile, lovable and significant,
you have probably developed a positive self concept.
• On the other hand, is those important have made
you feel left outm small, worthless, unloved,
insignificant, you probably have developed a
negative self concept.
• Self concept is a mental picture you have of
yourself. If you feel you have little worth, you
probably expect to be taken advantage of, stepped
on, demeaned by others.
• Our opinions about ourselves grow more and more
resistant to change as we become older and
presumably wiser, how you look at yourself is
affected by how you look at other people, how
people actually look at you, how you imagine or 52
Communication and self concept
• 1. List the names of all the people with whom
you interacted during a single day this week/ or last
week. For each :
• Identify the environment in which you
communicated
• Choose an adjective to describe your image of
yourself during each interaction and an adjective to
describe your image of the person with whom you
spoke.
• What can you say about the nature of your selfimage? To what extent does your view of yourself
change as you move from person to person – what
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Purposes of Communication.
• Intrapersonal (communication with oneself) To
think, reason, analyze, reflect
• Intercultural (between people of different
cultures)
To learn, relate, influence, help, play.
• Mass (addressed to an extremely large audience,
mediated by audio and/or visual means) To
entertain, to persuade, reinforce, change,
activate, inform, confer, create ties
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Visuals and Communication
• The use of visuals in communication are classified into
three categories namely, those that are used for telling,
and showing and doing. He points out that visuals that
allow the audience to “do” or experience something are
more concrete than visuals that simply “show”
something. Examples from Dale’s cone of experience:
• Telling : using verbal symbols, visual symbols, graphs,
charts, cartoons, diagrams, pictures, sketches, maps, bar
graphs, line graphs.
• Showing : using demonstrations, excursions, study trips,
video clips, films – these bring the audience closer to
reality than mere telling.
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• Doing : participation by the audience for example, role
•
•
•
•
•
•
Activity
Think about textbooks, newspapers,
magazines you have read. How have visuals in
these helped you to understand the
information being put across? Have they :
clarified an image not made quite clear by
words alone?
guided you through a maze of unfamiliar
information?
emphasized materials so that you remember it?
allowed you to find information quickly? and
to make comparisons between items?
People rely on non-verbal messages to help 56
Visuals and Communication
Advantages of using visuals in communication.
• visuals, especially tables can consolidate a great deal of
information int0 relatively little space.
• They clarify concepts
• They emphasize materials
• They guide the audiences through important material
• They make it easier to see an overall pattern and draw
comparisons
• They help to make ideas concrete and encourage
creative thinking by projecting alternate solutions to a
problem.
• can express simultaneous conditions as words cannot.57
remember
• Remember,
• Communication takes place within a system – as we
enter into communicative relationships with others, we
set a pattern by which we will interact
• We teach others how to treat us – we need to develop a
system, a structure within any communicative exchange,
and each person plays a role within the system. If the
role is accepted by the other person, it becomes a
pattern
• We communicate what and who we are – every time we
communicate, we tell a great deal about ourselves – our
selection of words, we tone of our voice and the
gestures we use combine to give a picture of our values,
likes, dislikes, experiences, beliefs and self perception. 58
remember
• Much of our communication centres on our
wanting others to act or think or feel as we do;
in other words, much of it is an attempt at
persuasion
• Meaning is in people, not in words – the
meaning of a word only has that meaning by
virtue of the meaning people give to that word
• We cannot not communicate – communication
does not necessarily stop simply because people
stop talking and listening – much of our
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remember
• People react to our action – we are constantly
demonstrating the action
reaction principle.
For example, when we smile, others are likely to smile
back.
• We do what we do because in the end we expect to
achieve happiness – when we enter into
communication, we do so hoping to gain from the
experience.
• We cannot always have the same understandings and as
others- as we communicate we must recognize that
because of differences in our cultures, the only areas we
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share are those in which we have common experiential
Human Communication
THE END
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